Zuloaga was not born poor, but with genius; and genius always spells discontent.  He would not become an engineer and he would paint.  His family, artists and artisans, did not favour his bent.  He visited Italy, almost starved in Paris, and after he knew how to handle his tools he starved for recognition.  It is only a few years since he exhibited the portrait of his uncle, Daniel Zuloaga, and his cousins.  It now hangs in the Luxembourg; but Madrid would have none of him; a Spanish jury rejected him at Paris in 1900, and not possessing the means of Edouard Manet he could not hire a gallery and show the world the stuff that was in him.  He did not sulk; he painted.  Barcelona took him up; Paris, the world, followed suit.  To-day he is rich, famous, and forty.  He was born at Eibar, 1870, in the Basque province of Viscaya.  He is a collector of rare taste and has housed his treasures in a gallery at his birthplace.  He paints chiefly at Segovia, in an old church, though he wanders over Spain, sometimes afoot, sometimes in his motor car, often accompanied by Rodin in the latter, and wherever he finds himself he is at home and paints.  A bull-fighter in the ring, as was Goya—­perhaps the legend stirred him to imitation—­he is a healthy athlete.  His vitality, indeed, is enormous, though it does not manifest itself in so dazzling a style as Sorolla’s.  The demerits of literary comparisons are obvious, yet we dare to think of Sorolla and Zuloaga as we should of Theophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire.  In one is the clear day flame of impersonality; the other is all personality, given to nocturnal moods, to diabolism and perversities, cruelties and fierce voluptuousness.  Sorolla is pagan; Gothic is Zuloaga, a Goth of modern Spain.  He has more variety than Sorolla, more intellect.  The Baudelairian strain grows in his work; it is unmistakable.  The crowds that went to see the “healthy” art of Sorolla (as if art had anything in common with pulse, temperature, and respiration) did not like, or indeed understand, many of Zuloaga’s magnificent pictorial ideas.

He paints in large coups, but his broad, slashing planes are not impressionistic.  He swims in the traditional Spanish current with joy.  Green with him is almost an obsession—­a national symbol certainly.  His greens, browns, blacks, scarlets are rich, sonorous, and magnetic.  He is a colourist.  He also is master of a restrained palette and can sound the silver grays of Velasquez.  His tonalities are massive.  The essential bigness of his conceptions, his structural forms, are the properties of an eye swift, subtle, and all-embracing.  It seems an image that is at once solidly rooted in mother earth and is as fluctuating as life.  No painter to-day has a greater sense of character, except Degas.  The Frenchman is the superior draughtsman, but he is no more vital in his interpretation of his ballet girls, washerwomen, and grisettes than is Zuloaga in his delineations of peasants, dwarfs, dogs, courtesans,